Submission and Emotion.

It is always amazing to me when I meet people who are able to be openly emotional. Like my mother, for example, when she is annoyed by my sister cracking her knuckles, she shows it and says it. When my sister is upset, she cries and she doesn't care that I can see her cry, in fact, it makes her feel better to have someone there for her. When my father is angry, he shows it, he doesn't do it violently, but he becomes flustered and he may even raise his voice a little. When my friends are happy and excited, they dance around and share their thrill at the prospect of doing or getting something. A friend of mine won an award recently, she's a very hard-working woman who has defied the kind of odds that would crush most people and of course, I was delighted for her but I was also shocked because she was delighted for herself, and I cannot believe it when people are able to do that. *Be proud* of themselves. *Be happy* with their accomplishments.

It has been clear to me for a while now that there is an issue with how, or where, I emote. Whether that's an innate issue or something I learnt when I was very young is not the point I am trying to discuss, but either way, it is what it is. I have a problem. I cannot comfortably experience emotion in public and when I say public I mean anyone but myself. I love my husband more than anyone in the world but if I am going to cry, he has to leave or I do. Sometimes I will preempt having an emotion by faking the expected emotion before a real one can be evoked because if it is, I have to leave. Something about uncontrolled but completely natural emotionality makes me feel very uncomfortable, it's akin to using the toilet in the middle of a room full of people. It's not that I don't experience emotion, I experience them all, I don't even hate experiencing them, even the negative ones, it's that I am pathologically private with emotion. I have rationalised all of this to *perfection* so I didn't really notice how it was a problem until a few months ago when I got pretty big, great news professionally and I didn't tell anyone, including the people who live with me and/or the people love me the most for weeks and when I did tell them, I really didn't want to, I just had to because it was lying at that point.

I know exactly why I didn't tell them.

I would have told them. They would have gotten excited and shown it. They would have wanted to celebrate. I would have realised that I am expected to show those emotions as well, otherwise I'm being weird, I would have tried to mirror them before I could actually feel them and failed, they would have done perfectly nice things to make me feel like I can celebrate my way, I would have started to feel joy/excitement/happiness, I would have gotten uncomfortable and then I would have to go be by myself for a bit so I could have excreted the emotion without it being a public affair. I have been hiding good news for decades because of this reason. Every exclamation mark I have ever used is a lie, a rule dictated to me by grammatical convention of how emotions are expressed and which ones are to be felt in which situation. And again, it's not that I don't feel excitement, it's that excitement, and most other emotion, is a solitary thing. I think this is why I like to write more than anything in the world. Writing feels like sharing your emotions with other people, but it's private. You can know there is an audience, but it doesn't quite feel real enough to believe they are in the room with you. Maybe it's akin to peeing with other people in the room, but it's into a diaper you are wearing under your clothes

There is one great exception though, to my rule of "it's inappropriate to emote around people" and it's emotions that are physically-induced. I'll feel anything, everything, if the emotion is induced via physical stimulation of any kind and it's probably because I cannot control that, right? If I feel fear when you slap the shit out of me, that emotion comes out without my intervention, my neurosis is not as strong as reflexes. I feel the urge to giggle after I orgasm, it's not in my control. If I cry because it hurts so fucking much, I couldn't have helped it. If feel elation when my muscles hurt when I have been running uphill for a while, it's a natural reaction to exercise, I cannot fight that. I dance when I workout, I won't dance at any parties, but I dance openly and elaborately mid-sets in a gym full of people, I whistle when I am doing yoga because the physical stimulus is somehow permission to express emotions without shame.

For a long time I have wondered why any power-exchange based dynamic works for me. I understand my masochism perfectly, I even understand some of the slavish leanings because of romanticised notions of suffering as worship, but I don't get why D/s appeals to me at all. I'm an unlikely candidate for it, I really don't fucking like being told what to do. Yet it has always turned me on and once I am turned on, my body is involved, and sex is where I have *all* my emotions and D/s is a fucking sushi platter of emotions. It's a perfect cocktail for a person who won't have emotions in any other social situation (and a date or living with a person is somehow social in my head). You can make a bitch feel like a lot of shit when she's turned on by your control over her. And I know that submission and such are not sexual spaces to all people, but to me, all of it is sexual, my master-slave dynamic exists in a sexual realm. My sexuality is not a part of it, it is a part of my sexuality and even when it physically manifests as something as benign as polishing a shoe, that is a sexual act. It's definitely turning me on to do it and that is the primary motivation I have to do it. I'm very selfish with my pleasure, I realise, even when I am not having orgasms, it's for me, not him.

I think I am coming closer to understanding why control-based dynamics appeal to me. They enable the creation of certain situations, especially situations that I have experienced before in less palatable settings, and enable the creation of a space where I feel allowed to express my emotions. To have them. I am a very, very sexually emotional person. The complete opposite of how I behave outside of a sexual space. The reason I feel such a gamut of emotions in sexual spaces is because that is the only place where I will have them with another person and I think it might actually be nice to have emotions with other people, especially intense emotions. These relationships allowed you to inhabit spaces where you can be terrified and really show it. You can be sad because of your terribly you are being treated and it's not shameful to cry big fat tears. You can feel love and affection and devotion and you can demonstrate it in the most elaborate of ways. You can create helplessness, despair, joy, anger, frustration, envy, *other emotion, I dunno*, within control-based relationship spaces.

And in that space, really only in that space, I can really enjoy and express those emotions and so of course, I find this type of relationship dynamic appealing.

It makes perfect sense.

Probably.

(At least until I have my next idea for an explanation).